He looked at me crushingly. “Because I’m a dragon.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “Wait a few hours. If we’re not back by then, call the Rainbow and return to Earth. Because we won’t be coming back. Tell my family what’s happened. Warn them of what might happen. Hopefully by now they’ll have come up with some kind of backup plan.”
“I will not leave the Moon until you return,” said the dragon.
“You’ll go,” I said harshly. “Because the world must be saved.”
“I’ll go,” said the dragon. “Good-bye, Eddie. Good-bye, Molly.”
Dust went tumbling in all directions as the dragon launched himself up and away, and soared gracefully off over the cratered surface. Molly and I swept our arms back and forth, trying to clear the dust away so we could see what we were doing, but it took its own sweet time settling back. I expected some of it to cling to my armour, but the dust particles seemed almost determined to avoid me. I had to look down at the footprints I was leaving in the dust to reassure myself I was actually there.
I started forward, and found I had to shuffle slowly along to maintain contact with the surface. Trying to walk normally in the reduced gravity just sent me lurching in all directions. Molly suddenly took me by the hand and swung me around, and then moved me carefully through the familiar steps of an old-fashioned waltz. I was a little clumsy, because I couldn’t feel my feet, but Molly always knows what I need to calm my soul in moments of crisis. We laughed quietly as we danced together in the Moonlight. Just because we could.
In the end, I broke away. Because sweet as this was, I didn’t have the time.
I clambered up the outer wall of the crater. Watching where I put my hands and feet, because I had no feeling left in them. I was getting really tired of having to do that. Molly made a point of not trying to assist me, for which I was quietly grateful. It took a while to reach the summit, and then I clung on to the jagged rim with both hands as I looked down into the crater. The interior wall curved away before me, and the shadows at the base were very deep and very dark. Molly started to say something, but I preempted her by pulling myself up and over the rim and starting down the inner wall.
I danced down the sloping surface, my feet leaving little puffs of dust every time they made contact. I was almost vertical, relative to the grey wall, and I laughed out loud as I skipped and bounced along. Being set free from the drag of gravity was exhilarating. Molly quickly caught up with me, her laughter mingling with mine as we descended into the depths of the crater.
Light reflecting from my armour and Molly’s protective shield finally revealed the base, filled with a thick layer of dust. Molly started to slow down, but I just jumped right into it, sinking all the way down to my chest before I stopped. A great grey cloud rose around me, and Molly dropped elegantly through it to stand lightly on the surface of the dust pool. I was already digging, throwing dust behind me like a dog searching for a bone. Molly gestured dramatically, and big puffs of dust were blasted right out of the crater.
It didn’t take us long to uncover a great metal wheel some twelve feet in diameter. Solid steel, with a heavy rim and thick spokes. I grabbed hold of the rim with both hands, watching my golden fingers to make sure they closed properly. I had to throw all my armour’s power against the wheel before the stubborn thing finally moved round an inch and then another, until eventually the wheel began turning in a series of small jerks. God alone knew how long it had been since the wheel was last used. I kept expecting to hear creaking noises, or the straining sounds of protesting machinery, but there was never any sound on the Moon. Everything happened in the same relentless silence. The only thing I could hear was my own increasingly ragged breathing. The wheel slammed to a halt, and I strained uselessly against it for a long moment before realising it had gone as far as it could. I pushed the wheel up, and the air lock attached to its underside rose too.
Dust spiralled down into the new opening, disappearing into the darkness like sand through an hour-glass. No air came rushing out, because there was no atmosphere in what lay below. Molly conjured up one of her glowing spheres, and it went bouncing happily down through the opening. The gentle green glow illuminated a steel tunnel, with a ladder bolted to the inner wall. The tunnel fell away farther than the light could reach, disappearing into darkness. Molly crowded in beside me and stared into the opening. She looked dubiously at the ladder and then at me.
“Is that thing going to be strong enough to support you and your armour?”
“The ladder was put there by Droods,” I said. “With Droods in mind. I’m sure it’s perfectly safe.”
“Can I have that in writing?”
“I’ll go first.”
“Damned right you will.”
I went down the ladder one step at a time, positioning my numb feet carefully. Molly came after, mindful not to hurry me. We descended for a long time, rung by rung. At the bottom of the steel shaft, the ladder just stopped. I let go, and slowly fell a dozen feet or more into a large cavern. Before me, a roughly hewn stone passageway dropped away into the Moon’s interior. The glowing sphere was already some distance down the passage, bouncing up and down on the air, impatient to get going. Molly dropped slowly down out of the shaft to land gracefully beside me, and I started forward before she could begin asking questions again.
The curving walls and ceiling had been carved out of a dark grey stone, shot through with blue mineral veins. The floor was entirely free of dust. After a while, it suddenly became a stairway, each step a massive wedge of stone with a good two-foot drop between each one. The impact of each descent should have jarred me to my bones, but I didn’t feel anything. The growing distance between my thoughts and my body was disquieting, but I wouldn’t let it get to me. I just kept going, concentrating on the job at hand.
The stairs finally emerged from the long tunnel and stopped abruptly, at the very edge of a huge stone amphitheatre. Miles and miles across, it was filled to bursting with an intricate warren of intersecting stone galleries. Huge structures, wide streets, intercrossing passageways, and accumulations of stone hollows like an immense honeycomb, overwhelming in size and scale. The details and dimensions went far beyond any human sensibilities. The City stretched away in every direction, with no gaps or breaks, as though it was all one creation, conceived and carved as a single thing. The sheer interconnectedness of everything made me think of a hive. Efficiency, but no aesthetics. No comforts, nothing decorative; just pure, brutal function.
“This is it,” I said to Molly. “The City of the Selenites.”
“Ugly-looking place,” said Molly. “Does it have a name?”
“I don’t think they went in for human things like names,” I said.
The City was utterly deserted, a shadowy gathering of random shapes and strange angles. There were structures that might have been storehouses or tombs. Or things built to serve purposes beyond human understanding. Circular holes in the walls might have been doors or windows. Narrow connecting corridors laced the buildings together in an intricate web. Studying the Selenite city was like looking at a Rorschach inkblot, imposing my own perceptions on what was before me and almost certainly putting inaccurate meanings on things.
“According to my armour, there’s still no atmosphere,” I said. “No heat either, just deep cold. Suggesting there’s been no heat or life in this place for a really long time. This is a dead city.”
“A city of the dead?” said Molly.
“No. The Selenites aren’t dead. Just gone.”
“What were they like, Eddie?”
“There isn’t much in the files when it comes to the Selenites themselves,” I said. “Not even a suggestion as to what they might have been.”
“Bigger than us, I’d say, given the sheer scale of everything,” said Molly. “But something about all of this definitely says insects to me.”
“I thought that,
” I said. “But this is all they left behind. No artefacts, no personal possessions, nothing to suggest what their civilisation might have involved.”
“No photos?” said Molly. “No artist’s impressions? Not even a written description?”
“Most references to Drood contact with the Selenites were removed from the family records long ago,” I said.
“Well, that’s not in any way suspicious,” said Molly. “Why would your family do that?”
“Guilt, perhaps.”
Molly looked around the deserted city. “They must have done something really bad here, if it could make even your family feel guilty.”
“There’s all kinds of guilt,” I said.
“This isn’t like that old film, is it?” said Molly. “You know, the one where Earth people bring the common cold to the Moon, and it wipes out the indigenous population because they don’t have any resistance to it?”
“No,” I said. “That isn’t what happened.”
Molly waited, and then made a short, disgusted sound as she realised that was all the answer she was going to get. And then she shrugged, and smiled suddenly.
“Still! Look at it. A whole alien city, so close to Earth, and I never knew. No one knew! It’s not right to just leave it like this, Eddie. Your family should have told someone. There should be archaeologists working here, digging for facts and puzzling out the City’s secrets. All right, maybe not mainstream archaeologists, but there are any number of specialised groups who’d be more than happy to take on the work. If someone else provided the transport.”
“There’s no hurry,” I said. “The City’s not going anywhere. There are no bodies, no atmosphere; nothing to disturb the peace or lend itself to decay. The City of the Selenites has stood for hundreds of years and will stand for hundreds more, untouched by Time or history. This is so big it should belong to everyone. Wait until Space exploration begins again, and when we finally return to the Moon, the City will be waiting. With all of its mysteries still intact and in place.”
“Is this the only Selenite City?” said Molly.
“No, there are dozens of them scattered around under the surface. They all look much the same. No one in my family has visited them in ages. This is the one that matters.”
“Couldn’t there be just a few Selenites left somewhere? Hiding out and keeping their heads down?”
“No,” I said. “They’re all gone. The records are quite firm on that.”
I accessed the map my family gave me, flashing up its details on the inside of my mask. A glowing line traced a path through the intersecting streets, pointing the way to Moonbreaker. I set off confidently, tiptoeing along in the low gravity, and Molly moved quickly into position at my side. The glowing sphere bobbed along on the air, shooting ahead and then waiting for us to catch up, like an impatient dog on a scent. Shadows jumped and danced, giving an illusion of life to the empty streets. Dark, cavernous holes in the giant buildings seemed to watch like empty eyes. I didn’t look at them, in case something looked back. I knew we were alone in the City, but I didn’t necessarily believe it.
The silence was getting on my nerves. I couldn’t even hear my own footsteps on the stone floor. Some of the map’s directions made no sense at all, but I followed them, anyway. There were no landmarks, nothing to help me judge the distance we’d covered, so all I could do was trust the map.
“Are you sure your map is up to date?” said Molly, following my thoughts as always.
“Nothing has changed in this city for centuries,” I said.
Molly sniffed loudly. “It’s all very impressive, in a deeply unsettling sort of way, but you can have too much of a good thing. I’m starting to feel like those archaeologists who uncovered the ancient Egyptian burial chambers in the Valley of the Kings, looking at the remains of a lost civilisation and trying to make sense of it.”
“I can assure you,” I said solemnly, “there are no mummies here.”
“Might be cocoons,” said Molly.
“Well, be careful where you tread.”
• • •
We rounded a corner and found ourselves at the top of another stairway. A narrow stone spiral, falling away into the depths. We followed it down for some time until it suddenly turned and then opened out abruptly, into a circular chamber perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, with a ceiling only ten or twelve feet above us. The floor’s polished stone shone so brightly its light filled the whole chamber and reflected back from the crystalline ceiling. Molly dismissed her glowing sphere. Dozens of open doorways stood side by side, with barely a gap between them, lining the perimeter. No Doors; just doorways. Filled with nothing but a kind of visual static that pushed the gaze away.
“Are those what I think they are?” Molly said quietly.
“Yes,” I said. “Dimensional Doors. Already activated, and waiting to take us to all kinds of interesting places. Don’t get too close, Molly. They’re nothing like the Doors we’re used to. Drop your guard and you could get sucked in.”
Molly smiled. “Drop my guard. Right. That’ll be the day.”
“These are Selenite Doors,” I said. “Leading to other worlds, other dimensions . . . other realities.”
“But this is the right place?” said Molly. “We are where we’re supposed to be, finally?”
“Definitely,” I said. “This is where my family left Moonbreaker, and hoped they’d never have to come back for it.”
“Then why aren’t Gerard and Edmund here?” said Molly. “They had enough of a head start on us.”
“This chamber has its own defences,” I said. “Enough to deflect even the Merlin Glass. Edmund and Gerard are probably out in the City somewhere, making their way here. If Gerard still remembers the way, after all these years.”
“Are you sure there isn’t some hidden danger here that they know about but we don’t?” said Molly. “They could just be waiting for us to trigger it so they can come in safely.”
“Always possible,” I said.
“Did your family leave any booby-traps? To protect Moonbreaker from unauthorized visitors?”
“Nothing about that in the files,” I said. “But it does sound like the kind of thing my family would do.”
“Terrific,” said Molly.
“Watch where you step,” I said.
We moved slowly round the chamber, peering into various open doorways. If we moved close enough the visual static would disappear, to show us what lay beyond. Strange alien landscapes, unknown worlds, and some places so strange, I wasn’t even sure they qualified as places. The Selenites had opened doorways to locations human beings had no business even knowing about.
Through another doorway, a desert of shifting, shimmering sands, under a bottle-green sky and a sharp blue-white sun. Cities on the horizon, made up of shining lights. Huge stone shapes stumbled across the desert like a slow-motion avalanche, unknown forms on unknowable missions. The ground shuddered under their slow, relentless march, as though it was frightened.
This time a night world, with no moon and only a smattering of stars. Fires from a single huge volcanic pit illuminated a human city of steel and bronze, with turreted towers and barricaded buildings. Encircled by a thick defensive wall, because the city was surrounded and besieged by an army of hideous monsters. Waiting for some order to attack, or for the city’s inhabitants to come out and fight. The hatred, the thwarted malignant rage of these terrible creatures, was an almost palpable presence in the night.
Huge stone hives clumped together on a desolate wasteland, under a purple sky pockmarked with dreary stars. Insects the size of men scuttled over the exterior of the hives, darting in and out of shadowed holes.
A metal plain glowed like burnished steel, across which homicidal machines threw themselves at one another in a never-ending war. With buzz-saws and grappling hooks, vicious weapons and pounding guns. Metal s
kin tore like paper, and silicon insides spilled out onto the metal plain. All of it under an unbearably harsh actinic glare.
Things got stranger as we moved from Door to Door. Mountains that sang, and skies that bled. A heaving sea of swirling colours, with great abstract shapes swimming in it under a psychedelic sky. A place of mists and shadows, giving brief glimpses of uncertain things, moving slowly but with sinister purpose. A place where nothing was ever solid or definite, whose inhabitants were constantly turning into something else, straining and twisting from one form to another. Uncertain shapes, always on the brink of becoming distinct and recognisable, but never able to hang on to the state for long. Flesh that ran like rivers. Bodies big as buildings. Dreams and nightmares and everything in between. Sights beyond human comprehension or sanity.
Some Doors showed glimpses of paradise, the kind of places you never dared believe could actually exist. Fairy-tale palaces with knights and unicorns and countryside like the scene of every jig-saw puzzle you ever loved as a child. Other Doors showed things too complex or too strange for the human mind to comprehend. Creatures that existed in more than three spatial dimensions, endlessly unfolding. Shapes without edges, creatures without boundaries, life without meaning.
And then there were Doors that opened onto vistas of Deep Space and all that it contained. A planet made of maggots. Stars that winked on and off like faulty light bulbs. A world that sneaked up on its moon and ate it. A staring, insane eye the size of a galaxy. By then I wasn’t sure anything I was seeing was real; my mind was just interpreting and trying to make sense of what it was being presented with. I’ve seen more than my share of strange things, but this . . . I glanced at Molly, to see how she was coping. Her face was deathly pale, but she wouldn’t look away from anything. She seemed fascinated and disturbed at the same time. We kept moving, until finally we returned to where we’d started. No wiser, and a lot less comfortable.
Now and again things would approach the doorways from the other side and look through. Living things, from worlds where life had taken very different paths. Bent and twisted creatures, all teeth and claws and malevolent intent. Tall and lofty beings, glowing with supernatural light. A wild shape made out of jagged sticks raised a single twiggy hand to tap thoughtfully on the other side of the Door, as though testing how strong the barrier was.